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MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 105

investment and the delay in recouping it led to ISL’s bankruptcy in May 2001,
with Kirch acquiring the worldwide TV rights to the World Cup (Milmo 2001).
KirchMedia had great difficulty in selling the rights at the inflated prices
necessary to make its original investment profitable. Ambitions to sell high-
priced fees to pay TV companies were in conflict with legislation in most
European nations protecting free-to-air broadcast of listed events of national
significance (as discussed above). European rights had previously been sold
through the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a group of mostly public
service free-to-air broadcasters (some of whom, curiously, are in North Africa
and the Middle East). National broadcasters, when required to negotiate indi-
vidually, baulked at the higher broadcast rights fees. The BBC, for example,
refused to pay for the 2002 World Cup a fee that it claimed was 70 times the
figure for the 1998 World Cup (BBC Sport Online 2001). A game of ‘brink-
personship’ ensued across various media markets, in which the unthinkable
possibility emerged that the Korea/Japan World Cup would not be seen in
countries where football was the dominant denomination in the secular religion
of sport. This did not happen because Kirch was forced to accept much lower
broadcast rights fees for the World Cup than it anticipated, precipitating
its own collapse and the bizarre outcome of the German federal government
having to underwrite the cost of broadcast infrastructure so that Germany, the
host country for the 2006 World Cup, could watch the previous tournament.
The disastrous collapse of Kirch was not, though, just the tragic tale of one
company and one mega-media sports event (Rowe 2002). It also involved the
collapse of Kirch’s pay TV arm, Premiere, and resulted in a dispute over the
buy-back of a £1 billion investment by News Corporation (Gibson 2002a). It
caused problems for Formula One motor racing, for which Kirch also held
broadcast rights and in which it had a significant financial stake. As income
from Kirch was also of major importance to German football clubs, many of
these now faced bankruptcy.
The TV sport picture was darkening. In the same year, the UK’s ITV Digital
went into administration with debts of £178 million, leaving several of the
smaller clubs in the Nationwide League in dire financial straits. ITV also
admitted that it had paid too much – £183 million for a three-year deal – for
Premier League highlights, with its in-season weekly Saturday night highlights
programme estimated to be losing £750,000 per week in 2002 (Milmo 2002). In
Italy, the two pay TV companies that had invested huge sums in the rights to
football, the French Telepiu and News Corporation’s Stream, were forced
to merge (Chenoweth and O’Riordan 2002). Across the world, C7, the pay TV
sport channel of Australia’s Seven Network, lost Australian rules football
coverage to a higher bid by a Foxtel-led consortium and folded. In summary,
predictions of the emergence of a global, sports-led pay TV and interactive